Category: Austin

Latinitas girls and I on the last day of the workshop about Locative Media

On last Friday, June 28th , I finished the first set of workshop sessions about locative media, in partnership with the non-profit organization Latinitas. Throughout four days, we discussed basic concepts about smartphones, maps, GPS and stories about places with nine girls ranging from 10 to 14 years-old.The classes were held at El Buen Samaritano, an institution that provides assistance to Latin@s families in Austin, Texas.

The workshop was challenging for many reasons: the complexity of the subject versus the short time to convey it for the girls, taking into account their age. Moreover, we did not have smartphones neither tablets for the participants to use, which is crucial for the goals of my research project. The original idea for the workshop was to ask the participants to produce a local story about a place in Austin and take a picture of the respective place. However, I understood in the first day that that would not be possible, because of their limitations regarding their age and the short time we had.

With this is mind, after explaining the concept of place-based stories, I asked them to bring in the next day pictures that they already had. Those pictures had to represent a story that they would have to write down, and upload to Historypin, the website and mobile application we were exploring over the four days. Many of them did their homework and were proud of that. By looking at the pictures, I understood that a few students had actually understood the concept of telling a story about a place and attaching it to a location.

Although we did not have digital mobile devices for each participant, I took my personal iPad for the class and each student spent some time exploring Historypin mobile app on it. I asked them to look for and write down the differences between the website and the app.

Based on their notes, I concluded that they did not notice that the mobile device recognizes your location through GPS and gives information about your surroundings on the map. Just one participant realized that. She wrote: “The computer History Pin doesn’t show you where you are, and the Ipad one does. The ipad was easier to move than the computer. I think the ipad is better because you can take it wherever you go.”I assume that this participant concluded this because she was already familiar with iPad, since her parents have one at home. When she was using the iPad, in class, I also chatted with her about the location aspect of the mobile application. She was astonished by realizing it. For sure, the small talk helped her to understand the application fully. Unlike her, most of the participants preferred the website to the app. This observation is not a finished one, because the girls spent much more time using the website. In this sense, I have to say that the use of mobile devices in these workshops is essential to come up with reliable results.

Despite all the challenges, I am glad to say that five girls were able to write stories about places and pin the content to Historypin by themselves. Some of them created an account on the website, because they saw a value on it. If you want to see what those girls produced, visit my research project channel on historypin.com. But remember that was a sort of pilot study, of which I learned a lot. Please, I would love to know your thoughts about that. Feel free to comment this post and start a conversation.

My research combines three different fields: locative media, citizen journalism, and memory studies. Building on the principles of these areas of research, I am proposing a new concept called “locative citizen journalism”, which briefly means the creation of place-based stories by local residents about their locality with a very strong historical, life stories, and memory aspects.

I am currently conducting fieldwork in Austin, Texas. For the purpose of my dissertation, I am taking the approach of “Ethnographic Action Research” (EAR). It merges methods of ethnography with action research, which aims at engaging different stakeholders in the research development.

Following this premise, my professor Dr. Joseph Straubhaar and I have partnered so far with two organizations, in Austin, where I will run workshops with local residents about the creation of local content and upload this content to a website and mobile application called HistoryPin (see more information below). During the process, I will observe, take field notes, interview participants and participate with them in the creation of their stories. To ensure the integrity of participants, I have received approval by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of The University of Texas at Austin.

Our two partners are River City Youth Foundation (RCYF) and Latinitas. The first is a non-profit organization located at Dove Springs, a very low-income area in the southeast of the city. This neighborhood is Austin’s largest populated youth community, where one of every two households does not have technology access, and the residents are mainly Latinos and African-Americans. Since many of the residents are Spanish speakers only, the organization has a bilingual workforce. In order to bridge this digital gap, Oné Musel-Gilley – the public relations of RCYF – founded the program/event TechComunidad, which is focused on the technology training of parents/adults to capacitate them to guide theirs kid’s education. Sponsored by Dell, TechComunidad granted many families with a Dell tablet in 2012. Those parents will be the participants of the workshops I will run about mobile/locative media.

Our second partner, Latinitas, is also a non-profit organization founded in 2002, with the aim of teaching young latinas girls media and technology. The organization publishes a magazine and also hosts media enrichment programs.Latinitas will hold summer camps in June and July. My workshop will be integrated in the session “Media is Power” (June 24-28).

The overall goal of these workshops is to help local residents understand their local environment in a holistic way, increase their sense of place (mainly about their neighborhood) in order to raise awareness of their reality in the city as whole. However, it is important to highlight that the workshops will function as focus groups. Therefore, rather than only teaching, my goal is also to learn from the community what matters to be reported, to be remembered in order to change the present and make their present more meaningful. I also plan to observe how they react towards location-based technology in general.

HistoryPin

HistoryPin is a great tool for this study, because it is a social mapping website and also a mobile application – available for ISO and Android operating systems – that allows users to pin images, video, and audio clips to Google Maps. Users can include a story about each image and other meta data. It also enables the user to create a channel, where you can manage and customize your content and page. The versatility of HistoryPin facilitates the work and uploading of contents, either on the fly or working at desktop computer. With the mobile app, users can overlay images with Google street view, take walking tours, and see collections. Users are also able to see on the map stories that are near to them, through location disclosure.

Before choosing HistoryPin for this study, I looked at several other applications, such as crowdmap/Ushahidi, local wiki, and Broadcaster. I also talked to the journalism professors Amy Weiss Schmitz – at San Diego University- and Cindy Royal, – then at Texas State University – who have tried some of these apps with their students. After doing the research, I concluded that HistoryPin would be the easiest platform for participants. It has a user-friendly interface, a very little learning curve for pinning.

Some researchers consider the low awareness of HistoryPin a drawback. However, for the purpose of this study, this is a matter of fact. Many past quantitative studies about location-based services have showed that users do not see a benefit in disclosing location and that those services are not reaching the tipping point. Building on that, I also aim to observe how early adopters understand the value of those apps.

HistoryPin is designed by non-profit “We are what we do” in partnership with Google. According to Kevin C. Miller (2013), the platform has about 232, 293 items pinned and about 400,000 visitors per month. It has also 45,000 contributors and 1, 100 institutions.